A piece of music has a beginning and an end, regardless of its length, its type, whether it is entirely instrumental, vocal or a combination of both, and regardless of whether it is part of a collection of pieces, such as an album, or by itself, a single. Traditional music selections systems, such as APPPLE ITUNES, tend to rely on music types, such as style and genre and other factors, such as, performer(s), decade, etc., to enable users to browse through vast libraries of music and make selections to, listen, rent, buy, etc. For example, in such music selection systems, the music is often organized by the genre, style or type of music, i.e., jazz, classical, hip hop, rock and roll, electronic, etc., and within such genres, the music may be further classified by the artist, author, record label, era (i.e., 50's rock), etc.
Some music selection systems will also make recommendations for music based on user preferences and other factors. Pandora Media, Inc.'s PANDORA radio system, for example, allows users to pick music based on genre and artists, and will then recommend additional pieces the user may be interested in listening to based on the user's own identification system. This identification system is derived from the Music Genome Project. While the details of the Music Genome Project do not appear to be publicly available, certain unverified information about it is available on-line. For example, Wikipedia states that the Music Genome Project uses over 450 different musical attributes, combined into larger groups called focus traits, to make these recommendations. There are alleged to be thousands of focus traits, including rhythm syncopation, key tonality, vocal harmonies, and displayed instrumental proficiency. See, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Genome_Project (accessed Jan. 27, 2019).
According to this Wikipedia article, each piece is represented by a vector (a list of attributes) containing up to 450 or more attributes or “genes,” as noted above. Each gene corresponds to a characteristic of the music, for example, gender of lead vocalist, level of distortion on the electric guitar, type of background vocals, etc. Different genres of music will typically have different sets of genes, e.g., 150 genes for some types of music, 350 to 400 genes for other types, and as many as 450 genes for some forms of classical music. Each gene is assigned a number between 0 and 5, in half-integer increments. The assignment of gene values is performed by humans in a process that takes 20 to 30 minutes per piece. Some percentage of the pieces is further analyzed by other humans to ensure conformity. Distance functions are used to develop lists of pieces related to a selected piece based on the vector assigned to the selected piece.
While the Music Genome Project represents an ambitious and detailed identification system, it suffers from many shortcomings as a result of its inherent complexity. The most significant of these deficiencies is that it often recommends pieces, as implemented by PANDORA, as being similar to other pieces, but listeners of those pieces are not capable of identifying why those pieces were determined to be similar. For example, PANDORA allows users to select a “radio” that are based on the music by a particular artist, such as Madonna Radio, which will primarily play Madonna music mixed in with a variety of other artists that PANDORA considers to be similar. Many listeners find, however, regardless of the artist selected for a radio, within a relatively short period of time, such as an hour, the music selection will go off in disparate directions, often ending up with holiday music and other types of music are not remotely related to the selected artist. There may be very good reasons for this, considering the hundreds of attributes being used to make determinations of similarities between the pieces, but those similarities do not appear to relate to what most listeners hear or feel. Accordingly, a better solution is needed.